Holiday Attire Survival Guide

Sandman to Teen Titans To X-Babies!

As I predicted last week, a LOT of exciting news came out at SDCC, hitting pretty much every corner of the comic book world — there should be something for everyone in this post!

First up, what I personally am most excited about: MORE SANDMAN! Not only is Neil Gaiman writing this new miniseries, but the artist is JH Williams III, the guy who makes Batwoman so freaking awesome. This isn’t the first time Gaiman has returned to the Sandman well — he put out The Dream Hunters and the Endless Nights anthology — but it will be the first time that the Sandman himself will be the focus of the story — and it’ll be serving as a prequel to the series, as well as answering a big question that informs the whole work (“just what was Dream doing that allowed him to be captured, which then altered everything else for him?”). (There have also been a few Sandman spin-offs — I particularly like Jill Thompson’s Little Endless storybooks and her two manga-style volumes about the Sandman’s sister Death — but Neil Gaiman himself doing a new miniseries is BIG NEWS.)

This is a good time to get into Sandman if you haven’t, or to reconnect with the series if you have, because the art was just recolored in 2009 for the Absolute Sandman editions, which were then turned into new editions of the (way more affordable) trade paperbacks— and it looks WAY better than it used to (I definitely will be buying a new copy of at least Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, to replace the copy I lost sometime in college).

Other exciting Comicon news tidbits:
—The Eisner Awards were announced! I’ve talked about the longlist before, but, as I said then, these are basically the Oscars of comics, and all are worth checking out (though I personally hated Craig Thompson’s Habibi, I’m in the minority there).

–If you’re intrigued by Love and Rockets after seeing me talk about it so much, it’s now available digitally! But buy it at your local comic book store instead, please. As for digital-only comics, Monkeybrain (as discussed last week) announced seven new titles, and those you can read digitally guilt-free.

And of course, we can’t forget about this week’s big superhero movie—The Dark Knight Rises! I have been trying to remain spoiler-free, so don’t have much to say about it for now (besides YAY PITTSBURGH), but the AV Club recommends some titles to get you started on Batman comics if you’re into Nolan’s movies. I definitely second their recommendation for Darwyn Cooke’s Catwoman.

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